As sales, licenses rise, gun debate stirs local passions

Published: Wednesday, January 9, 2013 at 5:30 a.m.

Last Modified: Wednesday, January 9, 2013 at 11:04 p.m.

For his hunting trips to Georgia, Daniel McLeod has a .30-06 — the gun he used to take a deer from 300-plus yards over Christmas. He was raised hunting, joined the military and the National Rifle Association, and has three more hunting rifles at his home in Palm Coast.

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McLeod, a disabled veteran and father of two, values those guns. He doesn't, however, fear losing them yet.

“I was in a gun store the other day, getting some hunting rounds ... there was a gentleman saying there'd be an uprising by the citizens, a civil war, before the government would take his guns,” McLeod said recently. “Unfortunately there's a lot of that.”

The conversation on guns in America is getting louder this year, stirred by a tragedy of violence in Newtown, Conn., and the promise of new federal legislation on firearms. NRA leaders have stated the group will oppose additional laws banning “assault”-style weapons, ammunition and accessories, as will many of its 4.3 million members and other gun-rights advocates.

The debate will find a strong foothold in Florida — with its 7-year-old Stand Your Ground law and more than 1 million concealed weapon licenses — and here in Volusia and Flagler counties, home to more than 33,000 of those licenses.

“You're not going to ban all weapons. Our country was founded in a revolution,” Daytona Beach Police Chief Mike Chitwood, who favors a gun registry in Florida like the one in his native Pennsylvania, said recently. “We're a bloody country, whether we want to admit it or not.”

We're also a divided country when it comes to gun control. In Volusia and Flagler, more people are buying guns — especially those assault-style weapons, according to one local gun store — and concealed weapon licenses increased about 5 percent over the last half of 2012.

But even more important than where we stand, those at the center of the debate say, is where we're headed.

‘RUNNING OUT OF GUNS'

Chitwood came to know firearms long before he became a police officer.

As a kid, he played with the service weapons his father (a patrol officer and homicide detective in Philadelphia, and later a police chief) kept at home.

Today, as a police chief himself, Chitwood would like to know where the guns are in Daytona Beach. (In Pennsylvania, the law established a database of all handguns purchased in the state.)

“From a law enforcement perspective, it was nice to know on the scene of a barricaded man what was in that house,” he said. “We don't know that here. Joe Blow is threatening to kill himself and his family, we have no intelligence whatsoever on what's inside that house.”

That's exactly what many Second Amendment advocates hold as their constitutional right — to keep arms in their homes, to hunt or protect themselves and their families, without the government monitoring them.

Yet people find uses for guns other than personal protection, hunting or target practice. A few minutes after midnight on New Year's Eve, Daytona police arrested a man they said was firing an AR-15 rifle and two shotguns (one semi-automatic with a buckshot-loaded clip) in the air to celebrate.

Aside from the long guns, the New Year's Eve reveler had a concealed 9 mm pistol without a license, police said.

Thousands more gun owners in this area do have licenses. In Volusia, 5.6 percent of the population has a concealed weapon license. In Flagler, it's closer to 6 percent. And that number is rising — the state issued more than 1,600 new licenses in the two counties the last half of 2012 as the statewide total inched past 1 million.

“We've started running out of guns,” Buck's owner Forrest Buckwald said. “What happens is when people all rush to buy something, it drains the supply system ... We can't replace the merchandise quick enough. Ammunition is starting to disappear. The assault-type rifles, those have disappeared. Every one that I get in immediately goes right out. It's on the shelf until the next guy walks in the door.”

What's driving those sales, Buckwald said, is a combination of concerns: One, that new restrictions will keep people from buying these guns (or make it more difficult) in the future. Two: Newtown, Conn.

Newtown, the same tragedy that's driving the latest push for an assault weapons ban.

THE POLITICS OF A BAN

In California, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein — who wrote the 1994 assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 — has said she's planning to introduce an update on the first day of the new Congress, Jan. 22.

Her bill would ban 100 specific guns and certain semiautomatic weapons, along with large-capacity ammunition devices that feed more than 10 rounds.

Guns that are already legally owned today would be exempt, as would more than 900 other rifles and shotguns.

Feinstein said the legislation “will be carefully focused on the most dangerous guns that have killed so many people over the years while protecting the rights of gun owners by exempting hundreds of weapons that fall outside the bill's scope. We must take these dangerous weapons of war off our streets.”

The NRA's Institute for Legislative Action responded that a draft version of the bill would require owners of pre-ban assault weapons to register them. And the organization argued a provision reducing the number of grips on a rifle would effectively ban the AR-15, the type of gun used in Newtown.

Gun-rights advocates have long said the “assault weapon” label on the AR-15 is misleading, and it's a popular hunting rifle.

“Some of the proposals I've heard are ridiculous — they're feel-good measures, and I don't think they're going to do anything to accomplish what the government wants to accomplish,” the gun store owner Buckwald said. “Feinstein's rules are targeting the tool, not the user. When Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building, there was no hue and cry. You cannot tell me what brand of fertilizer he used ... or what rental truck company he used.”

An assault weapons ban's true test is in the Republican-controlled U.S. House, not the Democrats' Senate.

U.S. Rep. John Mica, recipient of a 92 percent NRA rating (based on his voting record) and a small NRA campaign contribution last year, has traditionally opposed restrictions on gun rights. Last year, he was one of several Republicans who said Operation Fast and Furious, a federal “gunwalking” sting operation, was part of a campaign to increase support for gun control.

“They were trying to find a way to impose more restrictions and gun control in the United States, and blame, again, the violence and drug trafficking and the murders that were taking place in Mexico,” Mica said in a June interview on MSNBC.

Freshman U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis said during his campaign that he opposed new gun restrictions.

Neither Mica nor DeSantis responded to questions for this story.

On the Senate side, Bill Nelson is one of the NRA's main political adversaries. He has a 0 rating, and the NRA spent more than $600,000 on ads against him last year, according to the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation. That was the third-most spent against any candidate in the country, behind U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and President Barack Obama. The NRA endorsed Nelson's opponent, Connie Mack, in Daytona Beach.

AT A LOCAL LEVEL

Throughout the Volusia-Flagler area, most state-level politicians are NRA-friendly. Sens. Dorothy Hukill and David Simmons have perfect NRA ratings, and Reps. Travis Hutson, Dave Hood and David Santiago all rate at 92 percent. State Rep. Dwayne Taylor, the lone Democrat, falls on the opposite end of the scale, at 17 percent.

Falling in between is veteran state Sen. John Thrasher, the chairman of the Senate's rules committee who holds sway over which bills go to the floor for a vote. The NRA endorsed Thrasher in 2010, but not in 2012 — a year after he used his influence to remove part of a bill that would have allowed guns on college campuses.

The measure would have given holders of concealed weapon licenses the right to carry their weapons openly on campus. Thrasher, though, was a close friend of the family of Ashley Cowie — a 20-year-old Florida State University student who died in 2011 after her sister's boyfriend accidentally shot her with a rifle in a fraternity house.

“It's beyond personal for me,” Thrasher told the Miami Herald at the time. “Any other time I might support something like this, but I just can't.”

Thrasher's NRA rating sits at 67 percent today. He is a veteran of the Vietnam War and said he believes in the Second Amendment “profoundly,” but has never owned a firearm other than a BB gun he uses to keep squirrels away from his bird feeder.

Of 60 new bills he's seen introduced so far as rules chairman, Thrasher said only one is gun-related — a revision to Florida's “Stand Your Ground” law that would give police and prosecutors more power to question and detain shooters in those cases.

“I don't know what we ought to do, if anything, right now, other than pray for those families of the victims up in Connecticut,” Thrasher said. “Let's not let something like that advance some sort of political agenda. If there's truly something that needs to be done, Congress, I'm sure, or state legislatures will get that done. We've got a lot of laws now, and I think everybody suggests that, particularly at the federal level, if we would be enforcing those laws, some of these things might not have happened.”

Back in Palm Coast, the hunter McLeod said he's been trying to sell two of his rifles to help pay for last month's Christmas gifts for his kids. “You don't need four guns to go walking in the woods hunting,” he said.

“In my opinion, most Americans don't like to give up many rights no matter what it is,” he said. “It could be their right to walk backwards down the sidewalk. I'm not necessarily concerned they're going to ban guns completely, although if they do, I would be disappointed in the government.”

An earlier version of this story reported Daytona Beach police arrested a man firing weapons including an automatic shotgun on New Year's Eve. The police department now says the weapon was a semi-automatic magazine-fed 12-gauge shotgun.

<p>For his hunting trips to Georgia, Daniel McLeod has a .30-06 — the gun he used to take a deer from 300-plus yards over Christmas. He was raised hunting, joined the military and the National Rifle Association, and has three more hunting rifles at his home in Palm Coast. </p><p> McLeod, a disabled veteran and father of two, values those guns. He doesn't, however, fear losing them yet. </p><p> “I was in a gun store the other day, getting some hunting rounds ... there was a gentleman saying there'd be an uprising by the citizens, a civil war, before the government would take his guns,” McLeod said recently. “Unfortunately there's a lot of that.” </p><p> The conversation on guns in America is getting louder this year, stirred by a tragedy of violence in Newtown, Conn., and the promise of new federal legislation on firearms. NRA leaders have stated the group will oppose additional laws banning “assault”-style weapons, ammunition and accessories, as will many of its 4.3 million members and other gun-rights advocates. </p><p> The debate will find a strong foothold in Florida — with its 7-year-old Stand Your Ground law and more than 1 million concealed weapon licenses — and here in Volusia and Flagler counties, home to more than 33,000 of those licenses. </p><p> “You're not going to ban all weapons. Our country was founded in a revolution,” Daytona Beach Police Chief Mike Chitwood, who favors a gun registry in Florida like the one in his native Pennsylvania, said recently. “We're a bloody country, whether we want to admit it or not.” </p><p> We're also a divided country when it comes to gun control. In Volusia and Flagler, more people are buying guns — especially those assault-style weapons, according to one local gun store — and concealed weapon licenses increased about 5 percent over the last half of 2012. </p><p> But even more important than where we stand, those at the center of the debate say, is where we're headed.</p><p><b>'RUNNING OUT OF GUNS'</b> </p><p> Chitwood came to know firearms long before he became a police officer. </p><p> As a kid, he played with the service weapons his father (a patrol officer and homicide detective in Philadelphia, and later a police chief) kept at home. </p><p> Today, as a police chief himself, Chitwood would like to know where the guns are in Daytona Beach. (In Pennsylvania, the law established a database of all handguns purchased in the state.) </p><p> “From a law enforcement perspective, it was nice to know on the scene of a barricaded man what was in that house,” he said. “We don't know that here. Joe Blow is threatening to kill himself and his family, we have no intelligence whatsoever on what's inside that house.” </p><p> That's exactly what many Second Amendment advocates hold as their constitutional right — to keep arms in their homes, to hunt or protect themselves and their families, without the government monitoring them. </p><p> Yet people find uses for guns other than personal protection, hunting or target practice. A few minutes after midnight on New Year's Eve, Daytona police arrested a man they said was firing an AR-15 rifle and two shotguns (one semi-automatic with a buckshot-loaded clip) in the air to celebrate. </p><p> “These guys weren't criminals,” Chitwood said. “They're 22, 23 years old and they're quote, unquote 'responsible gun owners.' ” </p><p> Aside from the long guns, the New Year's Eve reveler had a concealed 9 mm pistol without a license, police said. </p><p> Thousands more gun owners in this area do have licenses. In Volusia, 5.6 percent of the population has a concealed weapon license. In Flagler, it's closer to 6 percent. And that number is rising — the state issued more than 1,600 new licenses in the two counties the last half of 2012 as the statewide total inched past 1 million. </p><p> Meanwhile, gun sales are doubling at Buck's Gun Rack in Daytona Beach. </p><p> “We've started running out of guns,” Buck's owner Forrest Buckwald said. “What happens is when people all rush to buy something, it drains the supply system ... We can't replace the merchandise quick enough. Ammunition is starting to disappear. The assault-type rifles, those have disappeared. Every one that I get in immediately goes right out. It's on the shelf until the next guy walks in the door.” </p><p> What's driving those sales, Buckwald said, is a combination of concerns: One, that new restrictions will keep people from buying these guns (or make it more difficult) in the future. Two: Newtown, Conn. </p><p> Newtown, the same tragedy that's driving the latest push for an assault weapons ban.</p><p><b>THE POLITICS OF A BAN</b> </p><p> In California, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein — who wrote the 1994 assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 — has said she's planning to introduce an update on the first day of the new Congress, Jan. 22. </p><p> Her bill would ban 100 specific guns and certain semiautomatic weapons, along with large-capacity ammunition devices that feed more than 10 rounds. </p><p> Guns that are already legally owned today would be exempt, as would more than 900 other rifles and shotguns. </p><p> Feinstein said the legislation “will be carefully focused on the most dangerous guns that have killed so many people over the years while protecting the rights of gun owners by exempting hundreds of weapons that fall outside the bill's scope. We must take these dangerous weapons of war off our streets.” </p><p> The NRA's Institute for Legislative Action responded that a draft version of the bill would require owners of pre-ban assault weapons to register them. And the organization argued a provision reducing the number of grips on a rifle would effectively ban the AR-15, the type of gun used in Newtown. </p><p> Gun-rights advocates have long said the “assault weapon” label on the AR-15 is misleading, and it's a popular hunting rifle. </p><p> “Some of the proposals I've heard are ridiculous — they're feel-good measures, and I don't think they're going to do anything to accomplish what the government wants to accomplish,” the gun store owner Buckwald said. “Feinstein's rules are targeting the tool, not the user. When Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building, there was no hue and cry. You cannot tell me what brand of fertilizer he used ... or what rental truck company he used.” </p><p> An assault weapons ban's true test is in the Republican-controlled U.S. House, not the Democrats' Senate. </p><p> U.S. Rep. John Mica, recipient of a 92 percent NRA rating (based on his voting record) and a small NRA campaign contribution last year, has traditionally opposed restrictions on gun rights. Last year, he was one of several Republicans who said Operation Fast and Furious, a federal “gunwalking” sting operation, was part of a campaign to increase support for gun control. </p><p> “They were trying to find a way to impose more restrictions and gun control in the United States, and blame, again, the violence and drug trafficking and the murders that were taking place in Mexico,” Mica said in a June interview on MSNBC. </p><p> Freshman U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis said during his campaign that he opposed new gun restrictions. </p><p> Neither Mica nor DeSantis responded to questions for this story. </p><p> On the Senate side, Bill Nelson is one of the NRA's main political adversaries. He has a 0 rating, and the NRA spent more than $600,000 on ads against him last year, according to the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation. That was the third-most spent against any candidate in the country, behind U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and President Barack Obama. The NRA endorsed Nelson's opponent, Connie Mack, in Daytona Beach.</p><p><b>AT A LOCAL LEVEL</b> </p><p> Throughout the Volusia-Flagler area, most state-level politicians are NRA-friendly. Sens. Dorothy Hukill and David Simmons have perfect NRA ratings, and Reps. Travis Hutson, Dave Hood and David Santiago all rate at 92 percent. State Rep. Dwayne Taylor, the lone Democrat, falls on the opposite end of the scale, at 17 percent. </p><p> Falling in between is veteran state Sen. John Thrasher, the chairman of the Senate's rules committee who holds sway over which bills go to the floor for a vote. The NRA endorsed Thrasher in 2010, but not in 2012 — a year after he used his influence to remove part of a bill that would have allowed guns on college campuses. </p><p> The measure would have given holders of concealed weapon licenses the right to carry their weapons openly on campus. Thrasher, though, was a close friend of the family of Ashley Cowie — a 20-year-old Florida State University student who died in 2011 after her sister's boyfriend accidentally shot her with a rifle in a fraternity house. </p><p> “It's beyond personal for me,” Thrasher told the Miami Herald at the time. “Any other time I might support something like this, but I just can't.” </p><p> Thrasher's NRA rating sits at 67 percent today. He is a veteran of the Vietnam War and said he believes in the Second Amendment “profoundly,” but has never owned a firearm other than a BB gun he uses to keep squirrels away from his bird feeder. </p><p> Of 60 new bills he's seen introduced so far as rules chairman, Thrasher said only one is gun-related — a revision to Florida's “Stand Your Ground” law that would give police and prosecutors more power to question and detain shooters in those cases. </p><p> “I don't know what we ought to do, if anything, right now, other than pray for those families of the victims up in Connecticut,” Thrasher said. “Let's not let something like that advance some sort of political agenda. If there's truly something that needs to be done, Congress, I'm sure, or state legislatures will get that done. We've got a lot of laws now, and I think everybody suggests that, particularly at the federal level, if we would be enforcing those laws, some of these things might not have happened.” </p><p> Back in Palm Coast, the hunter McLeod said he's been trying to sell two of his rifles to help pay for last month's Christmas gifts for his kids. “You don't need four guns to go walking in the woods hunting,” he said. </p><p> “In my opinion, most Americans don't like to give up many rights no matter what it is,” he said. “It could be their right to walk backwards down the sidewalk. I'm not necessarily concerned they're going to ban guns completely, although if they do, I would be disappointed in the government.” </p><p><i>An earlier version of this story reported Daytona Beach police arrested a man firing weapons including an automatic shotgun on New Year's Eve. The police department now says the weapon was a semi-automatic magazine-fed 12-gauge shotgun.</i></p>